Turtles all the way down

There's an old chestnut that's been told about at least a dozen prominent scientits, going back at least to Darwin, and in Darwin's day the probably told it about Newton or Copernicus.

The scientist gave a lecture in which he talked about how the earth rotates about its axis and orbits the sun, as do the other planets; the moon rotates about its axis as it orbits the earth; and how the sun and the whole solar system, orbit around in our galaxy.

At the end of the lecture, a dotty old lady stands up at the back of the room and harangues him.

"What a lot of rubbish! The world is really a giant saucer supported on the back of a giant turtle."

Expecting some flat-earth nonsense, the scientist smirked a knowing smirk and asked, "Then what is the turtle standing on?"

"You're very clever, young man, very clever,"said the old lady. "But it's turtles all the way down!"

Some people have unusual notions of cosmology. Today we got good insight into that of Danny Williams.

In one of his polling-week forays onto the open line show — expect more of them; the Bunker in the Sky at Confederation Building is obsessed with massaging the Great Man's, ahem, ego — Danny says that the Chairman and CEO of the CNLOPB is the most important job in the province.

In the province! The whole province! Right from St. John's to St. Anthony!

So it turns out that Danny is playing Copernicus to his own Ptolemaic vision of the universe. The earth doesn't pivot around Danny Williams. The sun doesn't set each night when he swallows it and rise each morning when he farts it out. Danny Williams isn't the centre of the universe.

The Chairman and CEO of the CNLOPB is.

Max Ruelokke is the centre of Danny's cosmology. The Premier of the province is not the most important person in it anymore. Danny said so. It must be true.

The only question now is, where does Danny now rank?